ENERGY POLITICS


ENERGY IS LOCALIZATION


Localizing our economic system is the best/biggest/easiest energy source we can tap on. The truth is that we don't have any alternative for both kerosene (air mobility and air transport), diesel (road transport and rail transport) and gasoline (daily commuting and leisure travel). The energy that cheap oil has provide these 3 products can not be equaled by anything we have available right now. Cheap oil is over and by that the role of cheap oil is over. Oil was an economic blessing that gave us growth, it has become an economic curse that will bring us stagflation. The only post-cheap-oil economic alternative we have is vibrant local prosperity: cutting out as many transport and mobility as possible. Otherwise only the energy surplus nations will have a vibrant economic perspective and all other nations just works for tax and energy, without any prosperity at all any more. Let's call our current economic system Global and our future economic system Local. Local = Vibrant Prosperity. Global = Foreign Taxation By Energy. We can't pretend that cheap oil is still there. We must have a new look, a new perspective on the distance facet of our economic model. We act in times of expensive oil like we did in times of cheap oil. Not very wise. We must stop fly daily many planes full of one type of flower from all of the world to Amsterdam, auction them there in small quantities per type, distribute daily many planes full of many types of flowers from Amsterdam to the world. This model was designed in times of $ 10 per barrel oil. It just doesn't work anymore in times of $ 150 per barrel oil. We need local flower production anywhere in the world. Than every man can bring home an attractive priced bouquet beautiful flowers each Friday again. This easy to understand example applies to almost all products. In the US the average food mileage is 1500 miles (2700 km). This is designed in times of cheap diesel and cheap kerosene. But that is history, oil isn't cheap anymore. We must reduce food mileage severe to maintain cheap food supply. We must start to produce everything we need local. Transport will become to expensive. We must start work in our hometown: commuting will become traffic congestion free, but eating out 50% of our wages, due energy costs. We need new location independent office technologies and new distributed production models. Production that is global designed by brands, but manufactured as close to the markets as needed. The Nike production of the near future takes place on at least 1000 locations. Global and local will find ways to contribute to each other in symbiosis. It's a psychological miracle that we somehow just stay acting if our was cheap and this way demolish our prosperity severely. There's nothing to gain by this, only much to loose. In some strange way we doesn't want to except that cheap oil had left us and that we must start to do things different just to maintain our prosperity. This is a huge deficit of all our economic/politic leaders. They doesn't points the way to the future, but even try to extend the future in a changed environment, with all its damage. Sure there will be electrical cars/trucks and we have electrical trains. But cheap abundant electrical power is made by cheap abundant fossil/carbon energy and that's no longer available. The whole new electric version of our transportation/mobility dream is just a fake idea: nobody knows where the power for this dream must come from. People really doesn't understand (severely underestimate) the huge energy load that carbon energy supplied us with. Transport/mobility will leave us for economic reasons, till we find new cheap and abundant energy sources. It's not hard to understand, we only don't want to understand it. That's the problem. We just hope that we could stay doing the same in an other economic environment. But just economics tells us that there is some severe price adjustment of one resources we use a lot. Something we accept and work around or we get smashed by to the wall (Simmons). Energy is Localization is a very valid statement.


Author: Gijs Graafland


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